Exponential growth does not come easy, and real life exponentials crap out. You cannot extrapolate growth carelessly.
People’s time and money are required to deliver each 1.5x improvement in hardware and this is treated like it comes from some law of nature. In 40 years, I have seen transistor line widths go from 1 micron to 5 nanometer, a factor of 200. Each and every time transistor line widths have reduced by a factor of 1.4, it took a great deal of money and effort to make it happen. In 40 years we have had armies of talented engineers shrink the line width by 2.3 orders of magnitude.
Exponential growth occurs when a process has feedback and fuel to spare. It always stops. The fuel required to feed exponential growth also grows exponentially. Either the feedback mechanism is interrupted, or the fuel source is overwhelmed.
Dennard scaling quit 16 years ago. It was the engine of Moore’s law. We now design a patchwork of work arounds to keep increasing transistor counts and preserve the trend observed by Gordon Moore.
People point to exponential growth and extrapolate it as if it were a law of nature. Exponential growth can not be projected into the future without serious consideration of both the mechanism driving growth, and the impediments that will curb growth. Graphs that rely on extrapolating an exponential trend by orders of magnitude are optimistic at best.
Exponential growth does not come easy, and real life exponentials crap out. You cannot extrapolate growth carelessly.
People’s time and money are required to deliver each 1.5x improvement in hardware and this is treated like it comes from some law of nature. In 40 years, I have seen transistor line widths go from 1 micron to 5 nanometer, a factor of 200. Each and every time transistor line widths have reduced by a factor of 1.4, it took a great deal of money and effort to make it happen. In 40 years we have had armies of talented engineers shrink the line width by 2.3 orders of magnitude.
Exponential growth occurs when a process has feedback and fuel to spare. It always stops. The fuel required to feed exponential growth also grows exponentially. Either the feedback mechanism is interrupted, or the fuel source is overwhelmed.
Dennard scaling quit 16 years ago. It was the engine of Moore’s law. We now design a patchwork of work arounds to keep increasing transistor counts and preserve the trend observed by Gordon Moore.
People point to exponential growth and extrapolate it as if it were a law of nature. Exponential growth can not be projected into the future without serious consideration of both the mechanism driving growth, and the impediments that will curb growth. Graphs that rely on extrapolating an exponential trend by orders of magnitude are optimistic at best.